Remember when you were back in school learning all about the solar system and even the mere mention of Uranus (which will always be a planet to me, NOT a star!) made you fall into fits of laughter? You’ve probably even heard the joke that Uranus smells like farts, and it turns out, it actually does.
- It’s all down to hydrogen sulfide. Research published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy showed the discovery of hydrogen sulfide within clouds in Uranus’s atmosphere. What’s hydrogen sulfide, you ask? The stuff that makes farts so stinky, of course.
- This isn’t exactly news. Scientists have thought hydrogen sulfide would be present in Uranus’s atmosphere for a while now, but it wasn’t until lately that they’ve actually been able to prove it. “We thought it was probably there,” said lead author Patrick Irwin, a planetary physics professor at Oxford University, during an interview with CBC’s As It Happens. “But we’ve never actually been able to absolutely say for certain that it really is until these new measurements we’ve just made, where we can actually see the fingerprints of hydrogen sulfide above the clouds.”
- Yep, it reeks. While Uranus’s atmosphere isn’t in any way suitable to human life so none of us will ever visit, if you did go there, you’d be overwhelmed by the putrid stench. “If [a person] could survive the fall down to Uranus, they’d smell a horrible smell of rotten eggs,” Irwin explained. “I’m not sure anyone’s really looked to see what the human nose would do in a hydrogen-helium atmosphere with a bit of hydrogen sulfide, but I imagine that you would still smell this pungent aroma.” No thanks!
- The research is important for other reasons. In addition to knowing that we’d definitely never want to go to Uranus even if we could, knowing about the hydrogen sulfide present in the planet’s atmosphere can help scientists to discover more about how the other planets were formed and how they got in their current locations. The more you know!
